33 



near the Broad Oak road. I am specially indebted to Mr. BarLlelt 

 of iMaidstone, to Mr. Dowker, of Stourmouth, and Mr. James 

 Reid, for furnishing me with a list of e.\tinct elephant remains, a 

 detail of which I have placed in an appendix to this paper. 

 From these collections I have been able to record about seventy- 

 five specimens in the Canterbury and Maidstone districts. 



Mammoth remains in this county are principally found to 

 the south of Yorkshire, but are occasionally met with as far north 

 as the Highlands of Scotland, in Europe as far south as Spain 

 and Italy ; but they have not been found in Scandinavia. In 

 Siberia they have been found in extraordinary quantities, and also 

 in North America. From a microscopical examination of the 

 stomach, the food of these creatures appears to have been leaves 

 and branches of the birch and larch, trees now only growing in 

 Siberia, 500 miles to the southward of the position where the 

 tusks are most abundant, some of which measure more than nine 

 feet in length and weigh over one hundred and sixty-eight 

 pounds each. 



The preservation of the elephantine remains is mainly due 

 to the low temperature there. On digging below the surface to 

 a depth of two or three feet even in the month of June, the earth 

 is found to be frozen. The temperature in January sinks to 65 

 degrees below zero. In some places they seem to have been 

 quietly floated down the rivers and to have become imbedded in 

 the mud, and sand falling from the river cliffs. In other places 

 they are found flung in heaps upon the higher grounds, as if they 

 had fled there for refuge from a flood. Mr. Southall also states 

 in his "Epoch of the Mammoth,'' that trees are met with in the 

 same situations piled in disordered masses, with their trunks 

 crushed and broken. Mr. Howarth, in a paper read before the 

 British Association, 1878, on this subject, instanced the dis- 

 covery of two hundred skulls of the Irish Elk on the Wicklow 

 mountains, in a moss only a quarter of a mile long and about two 

 hundred yards broad ; the result, perhaps, of a sudden inundation. 

 The destruction of the mammoth may have been brought about 

 in Northern Asia by a flood that swept the carcases into the 

 frozen regions of the north, where they were preserved for an 

 indefinite period by the cold. Tusks, grinders, and bones in the 

 south-east of England are found under the gravels and in the 

 silts that line the river valleys, and on the coasts, especially 

 where old river valleys extend under the sea. 



Such facts connected with these interesting fossils lead us 

 to suppose that roaming herds of these strange looking giants 

 must at one time have inhabited the Weald of Sussex and Kent, 

 browsing on the branches of the birch and larch, clothed in their 

 shaggy covering of long dark hair and reddish wool ; and thus, 

 defended from the cold and suited to the conditions of the 

 climate, they formed an example of that admirable adaptation to 



